The present invention is directed to a method and system for exposing a sample population audience to a presentation (a sensory stimulus) and evaluating the audience's experience by measuring the biologically based responses of the audience to the presentation and determining a measure of the level and pattern of intensity, synchrony and engagement of that audience to the presentation.
There are many different kinds of audio, visual and audio-visual presentations that people are exposed to every day. These presentations serve as sensory experiences that stimulate our senses and are known to result in biologically based responses that can be measured electronically and mechanically (for example, heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance).
A commonly used approach in making measurements for evaluating these presentations is that of interrogation, wherein the television/media viewer and/or Internet user and/or game player is asked to identify himself or herself as a member of the television/media audience or as an Internet user or as a game player. In connection with television viewing, this inquiry is usually done by means of an electronic prompting and data input device (for example, as in a Portable People Meter by Arbitron, Inc.) associated with a monitored receiver in a statistically selected population and monitoring site. The member identification may also include age, sex, and other demographic data. It is common to store both the demographic data and the tuning data associated with each monitored receiver in the statistically selected monitoring site in store-and-forward equipment located within the monitoring site and to subsequently forward these data to a central office computer via a direct call over the public switched telephone network, or via the Internet, on a regular basis.
These non-biologically based self-report methods of measuring audience response are known to be highly error prone. Personal logs are subjective resulting in recall biases, home monitoring devices require event-recording by the person and suffer low compliance, while digital monitoring of cable and internet signals cannot identify which household member or members are in the audience nor can they evaluate the level of responsiveness by those members. In addition, self-report offers no ability to capture the biological responses to a media presentation. Thus, while methods of self-report offer valuable data, they are highly error prone and cannot track the moment-to-moment responses to media consumption.